With team-mates like these, who needs opponents?

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On-field fisticuffs and training ground mêlées that make Bendtner’s and Adebayor’s tiff look like handbags

Sport is war, minus the shooting, Orwell said. But, as Nicklas Bendtner and Emmanuel Adebayor ably demonstrated last night, civil war is never far from breaking out on pitches and training grounds.

Times Online selects some of the more spectacular acts of brutality.

David Batty and Graeme Le Saux, Blackburn Rovers, November 1995

As Blackburn’s miserable Champions League campaign continued with a drubbing away to Spartak Moscow, Le Saux and Batty lost their heads when they collided chasing a long ball. After a flurry of blows, the pair were prised apart and made to apologise to each other in the